8 ms·

Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well tha

• CodesInChaos 6y ago
  > Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.
  • hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
    My tabs change order.
  • baud147258 6y ago
    That's a personal preference, but I prefer the way the tabs were shown in the older version, I could see more at the same time and reorganize them
  • sorenjan 6y ago
    Bookmarks and top sites are only visible when opening a new tab, not when placing focus in the URL bar. If I want to go to a new site I have to either type the address, or open a new tab leading to a lot of old unused tabs that need to be cleaned up.
    • rebuilder 6y ago
      This made me install Fennec from F-droid.
  • rkachowski 6y ago
    UI is significantly changed for the worse - things like tab handling (tabs go to the top of the list which may be hidden from view), swipe controls (close tab requires some weird "must swipe across 40% of the screen" motion to be recognised) and graphical issues have all suffered badly. It's not just a case of getting used to the new design, usability is an afterthought. But yeah, the ability to use extensions on mobile was the key feature for me switching to firefox. Now I would just like to find a non-sucky-non-chromium browser.
  • CJefferson 6y ago
    I've had many bugs since the URL bat went to the bottom -- it crashes on some websites and often has multi-second hangs. I had to go back to chrome (I will try it again in a month, and hope it has improved, as I prefer Firefox).
  • tennineeight 6y ago
    Tab ordering is messed up. Tab scrolling is bugged. Everything from before requires more taps than before. Pages randomly render blank. Normal and private mode gets stuck and next intent tab is opened on whatever mode was explicitly opened before. I would count the bullshit extension whitelist as the single biggest regression. But it is not new, so its not counted as such anymore? The worst part, I will still be using Firefox because of my principles. Mozilla knows that userbase like me isn't leaving, and those unlike me aren't staying. It doesn't matter how big of a screwup they cause next time. The writing is already on the wall.
• jfk13 6y ago
  > how many working on Firefox? 50? and 950 doing various (useless) side projects? You have a source for those numbers? It looks to me like you're just making them up because you want to sling mud.
  • natch 6y ago
    There were question marks along with the numbers. Clearly it’s a rhetorical device, presenting a reasonable speculation that matches the evidence (number of projects, and quality), as part of the natural flow of the writer making their point.
    • kalenx 6y ago
      Sorry, but a team of 50 persons in total to support a project as complex as Firefox is not reasonable speculation at all.
      • badsectoracula 6y ago
        Is it? I feel that people vastly overestimate the actual number of competent programmers (not managers, CxOs, etc) many projects need. Consider that even here on HN we have one person who wrote their own HTML5 renderer, JS-like scripting language, CSS, etc from scratch (csmile). How do you figure that to go from that to what is needed to make a browser that renders sites properly you need to add more than 49 additional programmers?
        • amedvednikov 6y ago
          Can you link the HTML/CSS engine you mentioned?
        • happypants23 6y ago
          Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams. Here's my estimate: * A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms * A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM * Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards * A dozen engineers or more to support the firefox core * Dedicated teams for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux targets * Dozens of Team/Programme/Project managers to _enable_ devs to do their best. These folks aren't optional. * UX designers * Graphical design artists * Technical writers
• cheschire 6y ago
  Yep. Microsoft had great timing with Chromium Edge. I haven't looked back since.
• Bworkbwork 6y ago
  This is entirely a collection of terrible takes and misrepresentations.
• nvr219 6y ago
  I think you made most of these things up.
• happypants23 6y ago
  If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years: * Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc) * Faster CSS rendering with Stylo * GPU-based rendering with WebRender Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tangential greenfields to do that. Sure so extensions had to be rewritten for Quantum, but sometimes that's the price to pay for deep architectural/security improvements.
  • eterm 6y ago
    There's a big difference between Firefox the product and the renderer. I'd argue the parts outside the renderer have got worse even if the renderer part has got better.
  • PetahNZ 6y ago
    How many people worked on these features vs how many are employed though?
  • pier25 6y ago
    As an engineer I see the value in these projects, but as a user my biggest gripe with FF is the lack of proper multilingual spellchecking. This has been on their Bugzilla for 20 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687
  • fireattack 6y ago
    I honestly don't see these as a good sign for a browser as a tool, instead of some software development adventure. Firefox has a much smaller team than Chrome to begin with, and they can only work on so many things. If they keep spending time in "re-inventing the wheel" (in addition to what you listed, they also revamp their mobile client quite a few times in my recent memory), what left behind is attention to details in UX and UI that users can feel, which is what Firefox was famous for. I'm not a developer, but I've submitted or engaged in many bug tickets on Bugzilla. What I can tell from my experience is that the response to bugs (critical or not) are getting slower and slower. Not just patches, sometimes you will have tickets that took years to have someone even looking at it. My feeling is most of developers are more likely to spend their time on Mozilla's "big goals" than maintenance. Just to give one example, there is still no full range video support in Firefox in the era of video game streaming. This alone lets me to have to use Chrome to watch Twitch.
• oconnor663 6y ago
  > Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. This seems like a case of "hindsight is 20/20". There are tons of successful projects that had people saying things like this about them at the start. When it works, we call it bold risk-taking. But when it doesn't work, we feel like we always knew it wasn't going to work.
• wejick 6y ago
  It's so negative, why people keep being cynical towards Firefox Mozilla.
  • liability 6y ago
    Because Mozilla keeps burning up their good will.
• davisoneee 6y ago
  Regarding 2) ...evidently focusing on their existing userbase isn't viable. So often these comments like "they are ignoring their user base" and "why won't they let us donate to firefox" miss the point (even if true / beneficial)...they don't want to double down on their existing user base; they want to expand their userbase to go with their mission of bringing more trust to the web Firefox was the better extension platform for years, and that wasn't enough to entice users away from Google and Chrome. They are trying, and failing, to find a differentiator that will give market share. Trust, privacy, and security on the web so far hasn't got to consumers' hearts, and extensibility and donations are basically just pandering to those few users that remain.
  • rvba 6y ago
    > evidently focusing on their existing userbase isn't viable. I disagree. First of all: their strategy to ignore the requests of existing users in order to focus on some potential new users doesn't work. Firefox lost around 10 percentage points of market share in last few years. Second of all: the whole "strategy" of alienating current user base in hope of finding new users is batshit insane. Browsers are a mature product: it is much easier to keep current users happy and grow organically. This is not some start-up that will come up with a killer feature - you evolve the product. You can scroll a bit up, even in this thread to see people complaining about the terrible user experience in last Firefox for Android roll out. Do you see a single person praising it? Long gone are the days when tech-savy users would recommend Firefox to their friends and family. Also, why did they even roll out a half baked product? Couldnt they fix it before rolling it out? As an user, at this point you might start to wonder if it is even worth it to update Firefox. How will the new patch break your workflow? Will some useful features be cut? It's not even about the bugs and the project seems to have them. People go to Chrome because it is stable. No batshit insane changes to UI or workflow. [and yes, I am aware that Chrome wants to kill the address bar to introduce "AMP" - what is a terrible thing for whole internet]
    • davisoneee 6y ago
      To self quote, "Firefox was the better extension platform...and didn't entice users away". Firefox's share has been declining for years, and I wouldn't say it's become a significantly worse browser in that time. They aren't showing any signs of growing organically. They are trying to get away from Google, and for that, they need to grow their base and bring in much more revenue from users, or just accept being a small side player in the browser market. You mention tech-savy...but is 'tech savy' what the public wants, or needs? Firefox has always been the more tech-savvy browser I would say, and yet they are losing ground to Chrome. The tech-savy browser is the one that's trying to push the boundaries; they are trying to do more technical stuff, which gives more opportunity for problems, such as workflow breaking. I don't know if Firefox _can_ compete with Google, given how badly their market share is declining. I think a lot of that isn't even due to Firefox, it's in my view partly driven by Web Devs no longer caring about ensuring Firefox is supported, and also just that "Google" is the average users' doorway to the internet. I think it's also partly because the Chrome way just works for your average consumer...click the browser, search, job done. Again, the HN crowd seems to conflate 'what I want' and 'the reviews I see', and fail to really think about what _the market_ wants, or how the average consumer interacts in ways that may be wildly different than the way a current firefox user interacts. Chrome is stable because they don't really seem to do much from release to release, and that _works_ for the average user.
• sfink 6y ago
  I hesitate to reply to this, because it's such a caricature of negativity. It's kind of a rollup of all of the crap that HN comes up with to fling at Mozilla. Everything has some kernel of truth in it, but it's pretty heavily buried. 1) The majority of developers at Mozilla are working on Firefox. Many more than 50. It is true that we have fewer staff than Google has working on Chrome (Mozilla is less than half, I heard rumoured?). 2) We did kill XUL extensions, after resisting for years. It would have been a self-inflicted fatal wound not to. https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... 3) Anyone who's had to make a decision of when to ship a product will be familiar with the things you need to juggle. There was a much earlier alpha that got close to shipping and then held back. You would have been less happy with that. There are later versions that would have been more complete, at the cost of maintaining two separate code bases longer. Massive opportunity cost. Was it shipped at exactly the right point? Almost certainly not. 1000 might seem like a large number to you, but we are a small organization relative to others in the same space; we can't keep a lot of extra bets going. 4) Superficially: uh, isn't that what bugs are? The only way to prevent your decisions from causing problems is to not make decisions, and then that's a bigger problem. Specifically with the signing, nobody forgot to sign anything, a cert expired. We screwed up. The decision to sign addons had consequences, yes. A decision to not sign addons would have consequences as well -- which we knew intimately, because they were very, very real and growing rapidly. But I can't make anyone believe that if the starting point is the assumption of incompetence. 5) Shifting resources away from enterprise does not equal "not caring about the product at all". I've long taken issue with that particular (now changed) decision too, but I never assumed that I had enough of the full picture to be confident that I was right and the decision makers were wrong. Contrary to prevailing opinion, just "providing" something is not free. Enterprise support costs resources. Throwing something over the wall and saying "patches welcome!" when it doesn't work for people is worse than not pretending to support it in the first place. Your beef with side projects is a little bizarre to me. Why do you think they take up such a huge percent of resources? Assuming 95% is not a good faith argument that I can even respond to. Maybe we could agree that 0% would be unhealthy and shortsighted? I'll stop there. I will suggest that you at least stop repeating things like "development teams are not working on core product" since I know that to be objectively false. (I'll admit that at present there is one fewer developer working on core product right now, but that'll be fixed as soon as I close this tab.)
• deleted 6y ago
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